Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 562
“Now, now!” he protested. “I’m afraid that’s a little extreme — about the house.”
“Not at all!” Miss Hedrington assured him warmly. “Your mother would impart all that to it even if it weren’t there intrinsically, Owen. So serene and yet so smilingly, graciously simple and friendly! With such a beautiful person at the head of the table, it seems almost sacrilege to think about anything else; but tell me, I suppose Miss Mars is a cousin or something of yours?”
“No; her mother’s an old friend of my mother’s. She’s just — —” He hesitated, then finished the sentence inadequately— “just a girl.”
“I doubt if that’s all she is,” Miss Hoyt rejoined, glancing toward the head of the table. Then she looked roguishly at Miss Hedrington who had an emotional failing humorously but unfortunately known to her theatrical associates. “It may be a good thing we’re to play here only a week, don’t you think, Isabelle?”
Miss Hedrington laughed quickly. “If Eugene, poor dear, were as susceptible to everybody he meets as you try to goad me into thinking he is, Lena, I’d better step aside at once and give you your chance at him, hadn’t I? Happily, I’m not of a jealous temperament.”
The mischievous Miss Hoyt looked at the ceiling. “No, you don’t know the meaning of the word,” she said musingly. “And isn’t that a good thing, too!”
In spite of herself, Miss Hedrington colored slightly and glanced again at Lily Mars to whom Mr. Eugene Allan was talking with a visible impressiveness. “Don’t be vicious, Lena.”
“Me? Why, you cat!”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” the playwright said, with perfunctory humor, and was conscious himself of an inward objection to the warmly appreciative interest Allan appeared to be taking in Miss Mars. Actually to be sitting next to that romantic idol who looked, off the stage, all that on the stage he promised to be, and actually to have his musical voice doing its best to be fascinating to her — what could more demoralizingly fulfill the dream and turn the head of an obscure, stage-struck girl just out of high school? Moreover, it was ironically cruel that the philanthropy now providing her with the bright tinsel of these moments was in reality but the means to bring upon her a disappointment all the more crushing. At the head of the table his mother sat talking to George Hurley with the characteristic smiling unconcern of an impulsive good woman who, because of her ignorance of thunderbolts, believes she can play with them. Her son sent her a long, reproachful and significantly imploring glance.
Mrs. Gilbert did not see it. She had placed the manager upon her right, with Lily next to him and the leading man next beyond, and, although she had cautioned Lily not to talk a great deal, she wished her to talk more to Mr. Hurley than to Mr. Allan; but now, here was Lily speechless apparently, and with downcast eyes and heightened color, listening steadily to the richly toned murmuring of the actor. “I must let Miss Mars have a little chance at you,” the hostess said to Hurley. “Of course she’s interested in the stage, as everybody is, and to hear something of it from one of its fountain heads, so to speak — —”
“Me?” he interrupted brusquely. “I’m a ‘fountain head’ of the stage all right, or maybe just a goat for having anything to do with it; but I’d certainly like to have a vacation from it sometimes. I can talk about other things when I try; I’m no actor.” Suddenly he became passionate. “Good God; but I get sick of it! I wouldn’t mind talking to this little girl if Allan’d ever shut off his tin horn voice and quit pushing his face at her to show how silly pretty it is; but I won’t talk about the stage to her. If you think that’d be a pleasure to me, you’re wrong! Isn’t it enough that when you and Owen ask me to your house you have to go and bring along all these people I’m compelled to live with in order to get my living, and that I have to sit here and can’t look anywhere around the room without seeing some actor’s face nor for one single damn second let my ears get a rest from the horrible din of old Joe Ord’s voice?” Abruptly, he gave a piercing tenor scream and leaned toward Ord who, upon Mrs. Gilbert’s left, was talking noisily to Miss Lebrun. “Joel For God’s sake!”
The outburst was so sudden and so vehement that Mrs. Gilbert gasped; Eugene Allan, reddening, laughed uneasily, and Lily turned open-eyed to Hurley. The elderly Ord, on the contrary, uttered a resounding laughter. “Bravo, George!” he said, in thunderous bass. “Gnat, thou sting’st me not!” He lifted a glass of claret from beside his plate. “Away slight man! Your health, ladies!” He drank, set down the empty glass and beamed upon Mrs. Gilbert and Lily. “Ladies, that man should have been an actor; I refer to the so-called guest of honor upon the hostess’s right. Dauntless, I say it; he should have been not a manager but an actor.” Then, regardless of the fact that Hurley said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” again loudly, stopped eating and pushed back his chair as if to leave the table, he continued, “I flatter him less than others do, yet I insist he should have been an actor. What is an actor?” He looked fixedly at Lily. “Fair child, do you wish me to answer?”
“Yes,” she said softly and eagerly. “Oh, yes.”
“You’ll be sorry!” Hurley warned her, in a voice unexpectedly quiet and resigned. “He talks about ‘the actor’ in hotel bars until everybody cries — after three A. M.! I see what’s happened. There’s a saloon across the alley from the stage door. Soon as I noticed it this morning I knew that before the week was out I’d be cutting his salary for delaying rehearsal.”
“Cut my salary!” The old player again projected a reverberating laughter. “Sir, you threaten the infinitesimal! There are things too small to be halved; they must be enlarged before they can be sliced. Now I will tell you what is an actor. But first — —” He again lifted his glass, which Nelson had replenished. “Fair child, your health!”
“Have you got a barrel of that wine or any other liquor, no matter what, in the cellar?” Hurley asked Mrs. Gilbert harshly. “If you have for God’s sake bring it up and give it to him and maybe we’ll get a little peace for half an hour or so.”
Ord set down his empty glass. “Speech!” he announced sonorously. “By Joseph Ord, sterling old Joe Ord, never in the whole history of trouping permitted to play a heart of gold but usually in youth First Murderers, Attendants or Second Heavies, and later Tybalt at the most; the King in Hamlet throughout middle-age, varied by some two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-one performances of Simon Legree, between the years Eighteen hundred and seventy-seven and Eighteen hundred and ninety-four, both dates of the genus Anno Domini absolutely, I give you my word. Subject: the actor. What is he? Don’t ask me!”
Lily leaned toward him eagerly; her eyes were brilliant with excitement. “Ah, but I do ask you!”
“So be it,” he said promptly. “The actor is any member of the theoretically human race who thinks somebody else is looking at him, or who is looking at himself. The professional actor is a person with an instinct to be more so. Sometimes he is a Narcissus beset by such a passionate sweetness of feeling for his fellow-man that he makes any sacrifice in order to give everybody in the world a chance to see how beautiful he is and hear how dulcet the sounds produced from his œsophagus, charging a slight honorarium for the benefit. He is all love, so loving he will play no part that does not make him love his audience the more for their greater love of him; his dramatists must have ink-pots full of noble deeds, great thoughts and boyish modesty. Ah, but this is no true actor, for your true fellow gives little thought to being watched from the stage door and perhaps snatched and kissed by uncontrollable middle-aged wives of road-town stove-store proprietors and absent traveling-men. We are not all of us Narcissi! Your true fellow has for God knows what reason a passion for making his body into the portraits of other people, changing his voice into the voice of others and making his eyes look forth from their sockets as others’ eyes look forth from theirs. He will stick glue on his brows, wax in his nostrils, plaster on his teeth; he’ll wear rags and heave up a hump on his back and whine in a cracked voice —— What does he care, so he makes his picture? He would rather play a monster than a honey-hero and he adores his audience for hating him. Narcissus dies luxuriously in his suite at the Holland House; your true fellow gets hold of a little laudanum in jail.”
Mr. Allan, slightly flushed, spoke in an annoyed voice. “Oh, I say! You’re not going on any longer, are you?”
“Indubitably!” the old man returned, with elaborate distinctness. “You hear me pronounce the word? With that ejaculation, upon occasion, I have cleared away a false impression in the minds of the police. We return to our subject. Your true actor, then, is a person foolish enough to live in squalor and perish miserably for the sake of being allowed to make pictures of other people for brief intervals during six evenings and customarily two afternoons in the week. Why does he? What ecstasy rewards him? None. I can only tell you that you would be mad not to think him so. And under what horrid conditions does he make his pictures, in what shackles does he work! He may not utter a syllable not put in his mouth by an imperious playwright too often brainless. He may not take a step, may not wiggle a finger, cough, smile, stoop, lift ear or eyebrow unless so commanded by a stage director always hoarse and nine times out of ten insane. In Nuremberg they have the Iron Maiden. It is a steel box hollowed inside to the shape of a man; they would put a man inside it and close the ponderous horrible thing so that he was a man immovable in a ton of steel — and there’s your actor, in a ton of dramatist and stage director. What! Can he work thus, can he shine through the metal? Why, he does! Come to the theatre and let the curtain go up; there he is, poor Tom o’ Bedlam, all warm and glowing in the footlights, making elf-land pictures for you out of himself, draining out his life to make you see a life not his, breaking his heart in his passion to make you see a gnome or a miser, or maybe some such cheap thing as a cruel banker. And if you do see it and perhaps hiss him for the wickedness you hate in what he’s made you see, is he happy, is he at last content? Never! He’s saying to himself, ‘I misplaced my emphasis on that word in the first act to-night. Ah, if I only hadn’t, they’d be hissing me louder!’ ” The old trouper again lifted a refilled purple glass, and, with what seemed necromantic brevity, set it down glittering but colorless. “There, fair child! That’s your actor.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Lily Mars cried, and she leaned toward him, her cheeks pale now in her excitement and her eyes alight with a hazel fire, while, at the other end of the table, Owen Gilbert held his breath. “It is! It is!” she cried. “I know! All my life I’ve understood! I feel it! I’m part of it!”
“You!” The barbaric Hurley turned upon her violently. “What do you understand? What are you part of?”
Lily caught a look from her coach and adviser at the head of the table; the color came into her cheeks again and she leaned back in her chair. “Of the audience,” she said softly. “When you have a successful play, Mr. Hurley, don’t you want the audience to feel it’s part of it?”
Owen’s breathing was resumed. He perceived that Lily was intended to protract the impression she was making as a “society girl” — at least she wasn’t going to recite at the table. But his soul groaned within him; the catastrophe was only postponed to the library after dinner.
CHAPTER SIX
IN THAT SPACIOUS bright apartment, an hour later, with the laughter of his mother’s guests merry in his ears, he reached the depth of his gloom, for he could no longer doubt that the moment was at hand. The four youngest men in the theatrical company, gathering at the piano, had burlesqued the sentimental quartet of vaudeville; then one of them, Harry Vokes, a fat young comedian with a face suggesting a dissipated baby’s, had sung “Silver Threads Among the Gold” and “After the Ball” in a sobbing tenor, with similar satirical intent. After that, besought by her colleagues, Miss Lebrun had given her humorous imitations of Mme. Bernhardt, Mme. Rejane, Coquelin and the elder Salvini, and during this performance Owen entertained a momentary wild hope that when Lily did Juliet and Lady Macbeth her exhibition might be mistaken for an intentional satire. But the glimmer of optimism extinguished itself; these experts would know better.
Several times he tried to get near enough to his mother for a private imploring plea; she was too gayly surrounded, yet all the while he saw calculation in her smiling eyes and understood that she was only waiting to seize upon what she’d believe the most favorable juncture for Lily’s exhibition. During Miss Lebrun’s mimicry, he thought he saw the calculation intensify; but he had another respite, for Miss Lebrun, concluding, to great applause, rushed upon the sallow Mr. Monk, dragged him from his chair and loudly announced that Mrs. Gilbert and Miss Mars must see his imitation of a visit to a Nickel Theatre. The stage director assented, and, going to the piano, played noisily with one hand, while with his other and the rest of him he mimicked recognizably the jerky and flickeringly seen gestures and expressions of the moving pictures. Thus, to ludicrous effect, he enacted a condensed idiotic melodrama, and, during its progress, Owen with a sinking heart saw his mother make the slight preparatory movements significant of her intention to rise from her big chair at the conclusion of Monk’s travesty.
Smoking a cigar unhappily in the wide doorway into the hall with his friend, Allan, the young playwright also saw Mrs. Gilbert glance covertly at Lily, who sat nearby with the quartet of young actors close about her, and he caught, too, the gleam of the girl’s excited return glance, as if she said, “Yes! Oh, yes! I’m ready!”
Allan meanwhile was talking to him in a voice lowered out of deference to the stage director’s performance. “Disagreeable old ass, Ord. You can’t tell me the older generation doesn’t hate us. All that tirade about the two kinds of actors — your ‘true actor’ playing heavies, low comedy and what not, and the other kind that just score by personality — levelled straight at me! They hate us because this modern quiet realism that we’ve brought in makes their old mugging and bellowing and gesticulating and clowning and all their nonsense of wigs and false noses and gluey whiskers look silly. Their day’s over; it went out with gas footlights, and they know it. Look at him, there by your mother, trying to look like a Doge or something talking to Queen Elizabeth! If you watch him closely, every now and then you’ll see him sneak his hand up behind his head and twist one of those locks of his round his finger to keep it curly. And that monocle of his! For ten years I’ve never seen him without it and never once saw him put it in his eye, because he’s afraid to. Thinks that would be just a little too much but believes it gets a fine effect dangling on a string and flopping about his monstrous waistcoat. If he cuts in on that third act speech of mine again with his roaring and snorting the way he did this afternoon I’m simply going to take him out in the alley and shoot him!” Allan laughed good-naturedly, drew reflectively upon his cigar and added with enthusiasm, “Alluring girl, your cousin Miss Mars. Wonderful!”
“What? She isn’t my cousin.”
“No? She spoke of your mother as ‘dear blessed Aunt Anne’. Oh, I see, just affectionately — lifelong family friendship. Do you know, Owen, I got an idea while I was talking to her at the table.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. In that second scene where I say to Isabelle, ‘I love you. I’ve loved you ever since’ so on, so on and so on, and she says, ‘Don’t tell me’ so on and so on, and I say, ‘I love you’ again, so on, so on, I think if I used a different tone right there — a little more tensity and yet more whispery; like this.” He whispered huskily, “I love you! What you think?”
“I suppose so,” Owen replied absently. “It might be better.”
“I got it — well, it just seemed to come to me while I was talking to her. A marvellous girl — that peach-bloom exquisiteness and yet of course no end smart, to the manor born and all that.” He laughed with the effect of explaining that his modesty was still to the fore. “Do you know, old fellow my lad, if I hadn’t got a pretty steady head on my bally young shoulders I could almost believe myself girlhood’s sweet dream come true!”
“You could?” Owen said with some blankness. He liked Allan, a generous, warm-hearted human being and a fine, quiet actor so shrewd in his handling of the materials given him that he sometimes had a startling emotional effect upon an audience in spite of his quiet. He was a good comrade, and now and then said something intelligent enough to be thought over later; but, after all, wasn’t he rather fatuous — about women?
“I’m afraid I could be that much a gilly,” the actor returned, “if I’d let myself.” He laughed again, at the same time clapping his hands to show his approval of Mr. Monk, who was withdrawing from the piano. “Hello! Your mother’s up and going to say something. Splendid!” Then, not noticing the spasmodic expression of his friend’s face, he began to clap his hands again and to cry, “Hear! Hear! Hear!”
Mrs. Gilbert had risen; she went gayly to Lily, took the girl’s hand and brought her forth from the quartet. “Come, dear,” she said in a clear voice. “We must do our own poor best to show we’re grateful. I want that charade you did for your mother when I was there on her birthday.”
“Oh, no, no — —” Lily protested, and seemed to struggle to regain her chair; but Owen thought her reluctance had little vigor. The other guests, meanwhile, were politely urgent, clapping their hands and with at least apparent earnestness entreating, “Please, Miss Mars! Please do!”
“She will!” Mrs. Gilbert announced, and, leaving the blushing girl alone in the centre of the room, returned to her own easy-chair in the semicircular group her guests had formed as spectators. Allan hurried conspicuously to make himself a member of the audience.
“Hear! Hear! Hear!” he exclaimed again, when he had seated himself; he clapped his hands. “Mars! Mars! Mars!”
“I wonder — —” Lily said uncertainly. “It would be better if I had someone to act at.” She turned and spoke to the playwright, who had remained in the doorway and had the air of a lurking person about to disappear. “Will you help me?” she asked, smiling though there was a tremor in her voice.
